Join the Conversation

Ebola doctors sacrifice everything

Marc Siegel
5:11 p.m. CDT August 3, 2014

Dr. Kent Brantly, an American doctor diagnosed with Ebola in Liberia, is shown working at Ebola treatment center in Monrovia. Brantly was working at the center on behalf of the North Carolina medical missionary group Samaritan’s Purse.
(Photo:
Joni Byker for Samaritan’s Purse
)

Back in the late 1980s, when AIDS was emerging, I was a resident in the medical trenches at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, drawing blood from patients and sometimes sticking myself with needles.

Medicine was a calling back then, and doctors in training were expected to take risks when necessary. We put intravenous lines in drug abusers with scarred up veins who were suffering from heart or AIDS-related infections. We came to know the statistics like our own telephone numbers — one out of 250 needle sticks from a patient with HIV infection converted the health care worker to HIV positive. Some of us even came to know and worry about the unfortunate doctors who were afflicted.

Back in those days, when AIDS was an almost certain death sentence, fear of AIDS was dominant, yet we managed to overcome this fear and continue to do our jobs.

Flash forward to 2014, when Ebola rather than HIV is the emerging virus in the news. Ebola also carries with it a high likelihood of a horrible death, this time from lack of immune response, organ failure or uncontrolled bleeding. Ebola has been around for decades, but previous outbreaks have been controlled.

Now that there are more than 1,300 cases in West Africa and more than 700 deaths since March, people are becoming alarmed.

In Britain and Hong Kong, health officials have tested airline passengers showing early flu-like symptoms of Ebola. But travel advisories or even restricting travel won’t help as they didn’t help very much with SARS in 2003.

The ability to contain this outbreak, as in the past, starts at the source, and with the doctors working on the front lines. As it was with the early years of AIDS, so it is now: treating doctors who disregard their own safety in order to help others.

Americans Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, both of the aid group Samaritan’s Purse, contracted the dreaded disease while treating patients in Liberia. On Thursday, Brantly received an “experimental serum” to treat the disease, but because there was only one dose, he gave it to Writebol.

Earlier this month, Ugandan doctor Samuel Muhumuza Mutoro and Samuel Brisbane, a prominent Liberian physician, died from the disease. In Sierra Leone, another top Ebola doctor, Sheik Umar Khan, has also died.

These doctors are inspiring role models for young doctors in training. They see medicine as a high calling, and they put their lives on the line to try to stop a viral freight train that is picking up speed.

The courage these doctors display is the only antidote to fear and the best protection we have from a deadly disease.

Marc Siegel, a physician, is an associate professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Medical Center. He is the author of “False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear.”